


Now Grasping, Now Blind

by Chioces



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare, The King (2019)
Genre: Dirty Talk, Dirty Thoughts, First Time, Jealousy, M/M, Praise Kink, The author can't get over the UST, Top John Falstaff, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:00:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22520641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chioces/pseuds/Chioces
Summary: John finds himself unbearably drawn to Hal. But he can resist, of course he can resist. It's just a temporary madness after all.
Relationships: Sir John Falstaff/Henry V of England, Sir John Falstaff/Prince Hal (Shakespeare)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 63





	1. Chapter 1

Here he is, standing by his bed, turned away from John, fully dressed, awake and aware, at least for the time being. Falstaff opens his mouth to call the prince to breakfast, and hesitates, there’s something in the air, a tactile quality to the silence. 

John watches Hal rub his palm against the nape of his neck, and run fingers, splayed and forceful, into his hair, exposing the long pale line of it to Falstaff’s eyes. Longing twists John’s gut, and all the air leaves his lungs in a rush. John thinks he might just go to his knees at the sight of him.

John steps back. It’s a fluke, a mistake, an accidental, hungover idea that in no way reflects reality. John wants shapely buttocks and soft bosoms, not sharp angles and sinewy lines. He wants the joyful, thoughtless laughter of happy maidens, not the morose, overwhelming gravity of Hal.

“What say you?” Hal asks without turning, and John tries, truly, desperately tries to speak without letting his entire soul spill from his mouth and fall squirming and oozing at the prince’s feet. “Speak man.”

But John can’t because something is undulating inside him, fighting for control of his mind, his mouth, his hands. John wants.

Hal turns, and John thinks, I am blinded, you have blinded me. 

Hal tips his head to the side, black curls falling nearly to one shoulder. He inspects John with careful precision, then approaches, comes close, closer, far too close. 

John balls his hands into fists to keep from touching the boy. He doesn’t want to touch him, he has no interest in him. But it is as though Hal, who has always been Hal, has somehow transformed in the night, and John, who’s always vaguely appreciated his beauty, can all at once, no longer turn away from it. 

Falstaff tries to step back, fails, reaches out, hand moving without consent, and pushes his fingers into Hal’s dark hair, right into the place where the prince’s were a moment ago, and tugs with an insistent, gentle force. 

Hal’s eyes close, his head follows, baring the line of his throat. John cannot breathe. Has to open his mouth to suck in air; thinks: I can almost taste the smell of him, before releasing Hal and finally stepping away. 

“Breakfast,” he says, wondering if Hal can hear how hard those two syllables were for him. 

Hal nods. “You’re hungry?” he asks.

John thinks hunger is not the right word for this ache, this utter, overwhelming need to touch. To own. To keep. What a monster he is, turning the boy’s longing for affection, into a dark, hungry lust. 

John leaves. Hal follows. 

*

That night they drink. They dance. They leave their souls, or maybe their souls leave them, and for a while they are so close that John forgets the newfound longing.

Then, as it is with these kinds of perfect nights, Hal catches a maiden’s eye, and she comes to them, all seductive grace, and slides herself beside them, taking Hal by the hand. Hal hesitates, looking to John for only a moment, before following her to a table with a shake of his head. 

All at once, John’s livid, overtaken by the urge to follow, he has to close his eyes, talk himself down, turn away and return to the bar. Surely if he drinks enough tonight, this horrid madness will finally abandon him.

“Whiskey, old hag,” he shouts to the innkeeper over the noise. He grips the bar with angry fingers. Keeps his back to Hal: if John can’t see it, it needn’t be happening.

*  
The night goes on. Hal leaves. Returns. John thinks he’ll soon be too drunk to stand.  
Thinks he’ll soon be drunk enough to stand both Hal’s proximity and his distance. 

“There is nothing more important than you,” he says to the boy, when he joins John at the bar, “there’s nothing of my life, but you.” And it’s true, John knows, deeply, indisputably, that every action, every hollow victory in his life has dragged him, kicking and screaming to this very spot, beside this perfect, precious boy. 

“My friend,” says Hal, placing his forehead onto John’s shoulder, “my dear beloved friend.”

The words send a fresh wave of heat coursing through John’s body. He allows himself to rest his palm upon Hal’s waist and pull him just a little closer. 

It’s very warm. John thinks he might be burning. 

Hal steps away, stumbles, and John finds himself lifting Hal up into his arms. 

“I wish,” whispers Hal into John’s chest, as Falstaff carries him up the stairs, nose deep in the boy’s hair, “I wish…”

“What boy, what do you wish for?”

“You,” and John feels himself still, right there on the threshold, one foot inside Hal’s room, the other outside it, “you should not let me sleep alone. The night is very hard for me.”

John lays Hal out on the bed and stands there, watching him as he runs his palm down his chest and then up, under his shirt, exposing the smallest slither of flesh. He tells himself he can resist touching as climbs in beside him. He tells himself he’ll only stay until Hal nods off. Tells himself this over and over until his eyes close and sleep takes him.

*

John wakes, blinks at the soft summer sun resting on the pillow beside him, he follows it to the widow, and there, a wisp of a silhouette, is Hal, nude and leaning against the sill, trousers seemingly forgotten in his hand, looking out onto the street. He doesn’t move at all, but for the steady rise and decent of his breath, shifting his shoulder in and out of direct sunlight.

Hal is now as he was the first time John saw him in the inn: a sad thread of a boy, leaning, just like this, against the fireplace, looking out onto the common-room. 

John doesn’t need to see Hal’s face to know the expression on it. Sharp boyish angles taught with an unshakable melancholy, an immovable weight. 

“Will you remain with me?” Hal asks.

“From now till Megiddo,” says John, and means it—the world will burn long before he leaves the boy-king’s side. 

*

Normally John refrains from enjoying the company of women in front of Hal, held back not so much by morality, as by an inability to focus on anything or anyone but the boy. 

That should have been the first sign, but somehow Falstaff had thought it only loyalty to an heir he could finally believe in, even if Hal never would willingly take the three steps necessary for him to take the English Throne. 

When the boy is in the room, John’s eyes are forever trained on him, when he is out of it, John watches the stairs with such devotion he may well be a hound, adamant in his mission to protect Hal from assassins, even though he knows there be no assassins here. The prince is too contemptuous of both his father and the crown to be more than a passing thought in the mind of any would-be usurper. The boy’s as likely to praise a coup as he is to try to stop it. 

Tonight though, a new girl, passing through town on her way to London, has set her sights on John, and though he’d told her with as much genteelness as he could muster that he can’t offer her more than a single night, she persists. 

If John is honest with himself, he’s relieved by her insistence: he’s never needed a woman quite so much as he needs this girl tonight. So he grips her hips, lets his lips follow the soft line of her jaw. John closes his eyes and doesn’t imagine anyone but her. 

When he opens them Hal is staring right at him. He seems surprised, or angry. For the first time in a long while John can no more read Hal’s expression than he can read the wind. 

Hal swallow. Opens his mouth. Closes it. His face hardens and he turns away. 

John pushes his girl against a pillar, presses in, right up close, cups her breasts, slides his thumbs between them. 

“So beautiful,” he whispers, and hears the subtle inflection of a lie in the words. 

He thinks about fucking her in Hal’s bed, surrounded by his bedding and his sent. Abruptly rock hard, just in the imagining, Falstaff maneuvers her to the stairs, almost leads her up them, and at the last moment takes her by her delicate wrist and leads her out of the inn, into the sables, knowing he can’t allow himself such a depravity, knowing that if he’s not careful, he’ll never rid himself by the vile sickness that has taken over his body and mind. 

“If you can take my heart as well as my cock, I will marry you at sunup,” he promises, voice deep and heavy with hope. It’s the truth: he’ll do just about anything if he wakes in the morning and doesn’t think about Hal’s pale thighs wrapped tight about his waist as John takes him, over and over and—

The girl’s lips wrap about his cock and John groans, closes his eyes, see Hal, whining and open mouthed and needy. The rush that follows is dizzying. 

*

In the morning John doesn’t marry the girl.


	2. Chapter 2

Falstaff stands at the bottom of the inn’s stairs for a long while. He looks at every step. Imagines climbing them: one foot, then the other, muscles straining with his weight. He lifts a leg and sets it back down, uncertain. How is he to do this, face him, now, after the night before?

He knows that there was no betrayal, knows that he is free to do and bed whomever he wants, and still, he feels in his bones, as they feel the rain, that he has committed an unforgivable act. Has forsaken something precious and profound.

John grits his teeth, shakes the feeling from himself. Whatever he may think of his actions last night, Hal surely doesn’t see them as such. The prince will think nothing of it. Will laugh and ask him if he enjoyed himself. And Falstaff will say: best whore in this world, and they will come back down to break fast, and soon enough the whole thing will be forgotten. Because the sick feeling of unfaithfulness is John’s alone.

John nods, collects himself and climbs the stairs. He unlocks the boy’s door with his secret key. Walks in.

Hal is sitting on the edge of his bed, fully dressed, leaving forward, elbows on his knees.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” asks Hal without looking at him. There is no gaiety in his voice, just sharp, stabbing accusation.

John frowns, licks his lips. Doesn’t rise to the bait.

“I did, she was rather… enthusiastic. You should have seen the breast on her, firm and upright, like a young girl, but with the skills of a _highly_ competent woman.”

Hal rubs a palm over his face, and the stab of guilt John feels at The prince’s pained expression infuriates him. Who does Hal think he is? Does he expect celibacy from those that serve him? Has he deemed himself a God? Requiring mental and spiritual and even bodily devotion, while he himself, galavants from bed to bed, has such a parade of girls that John can no longer distinguish among them, is sure Hal’s bedded some of them twice, by virtue of sheer forgetfulness rather than any interest in a second go-around.

“I should start taking them up on their offers more,” Falstaff sneers, wanting to lash out, to hurt, to shatter. “I have forgotten what a delight a woman’s mouth about my cock can be.”

Hal finally meets his eyes, and his are so full of quiet fury, that John, at once in his body and out of it, see his control give way to desperate, overwhelming anger.

“What, are you not pleased for me your grace?” Falstaff asks, hearing the bile in his voice, and no more able to control it than his shaking hands, “do you not wish for me to see the pleasures you so thoughtlessly partake in night by night?” Night by night and night and night.

“Pleased for you? Of course I’m pleased to see you shed your honor at the feet of some trollop. But oh, she was pretty, with the dark hair and big eyes, worth abandoning your duties for, forsaking all your pride.”

“What duties be those? Watching over your drunken self-annihilation? You should be at your father’s death-bed. You should be King, fixing all the things you find unbearable and vile, instead you—”

“Do we now speak of your weaknesses or mine? You well know I’ve not interest in the throne. Thomas may have it if he will. Want none of it. I want you,” Hal closes his eyes, opens them, John swallows, “I want you to… you have sworn oaths to me. You have sworn oaths and then you go and--”

John doesn’t understand what Hal is saying, he tries to puzzle it out, untangle the mess of words, see through them into the truth. None of this makes sense, this whole argument, all of Hal’s anger.

A thought slips through then, unwanted and unannounced, a horrible realization. It’s worse than anything John’s ever thought before, and John exhales with the wrenching twist of it—Hal’s not angry at John for spending the night with the girl, he’s angry at the girl for spending the night with John. John thinks he might just lose his stomach.

“Was it the girl?” he asks, voice rising with each word. “Do you want her? Shall I go fetch her? Send her up here? She’s yet to leave town, I’m sure. Perhaps you want two girls at once? Perhaps that will satisfy you? And you will see it as service enough? Supplying you with what you need? And I shall stand guard at your door, your loyal hound, listening to you fuck your way through—”

Hal shakes his head, teeth clenched together with visible disgust. “Get out,” he says.

John refuses to move.

“I said, get out.”

But Falstaff stays.

“I see you liked her,” says Hal, rising from the bed, spreading himself out, and for such a wisp of a boy, he’s an incredible sight. “Was she good for you? Did she moan and scream? Beg for your cock?”

“Hal, stop,” breathes John, stepping back at the sheer force of the words, “you must stop.”

“Will you wed her? Bed _her_ , night by night? Will the two of you make ugly little Falstaffs?”

“Hold your tongue.”

“I am your liege, you dare not speak to me in such a manner.”

“You are a spoiled, rotten little boy who never knows how to—”

But Hal is upon him then, viscous fists slamming into John’s soft belly. John grunts, grabs the boy, clutches him, pressing him to himself, closer, closer, “What do you want from me? What do you want? You silly boy, don’t you see? Can you not see what you are doing to me?”

And Hal is rising to his toes, gripping John by the hair, pulling him down, crushing their mouths together, dousing John’s anger with the single, thoughtless act.

“You shall not bed her again,” Hal snarls, open mouthed, “I forbid it, do you hear? You shall bed no one. Never. You may touch no other.” Hal kisses and licks and bites and John does everything he can to remain absolutely still, because if he doesn’t he will have this boy naked, on his back, and nothing, not even hell itself will stop him.

Hal softens then, his mouth more a caress then punishment, “kiss me John, I order you to—”

John groans. His fingers tighten around Hal’s ribs. His body _longs_. And he repeats resist, resist, resist, like a prayer inside his head. If he gives in he’ll be lost. He lets his lips rub over Hal’s, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, breathing, open mouthed, hoping to inhale his taste, his dark tenderness.

“Please,” Hal gasps, “my friend, please kiss me.”

And John feels his knees buckle, clutching at Hal, running forceful hands up and down his sides, around and across his back, pulling him close, closer, as close as he can bear. Hal whimpers, and John can hear in the sound of it, his own undoing, his very own personal gate to hell, open in welcome.

“I cannot boy,” John says against Hal’s skin, “If I’m to start, I cannot—no,” and even as he tries to pull away, he’s pressing closer, gripping the prince’s arms. “You must still be drunk.” John’s unable to stop his mouth from running over the sharp jut of his boy-smooth jawline, god, how he _aches_. “You want a night, but I won’t be able to stop. I won’t be able to let you go back to your whoring,” his own words bring an onslaught of images of Hal, in this bed, just behind him, fucking and gasping, crying out, “I barely stand the thought. Even now, and if we—”

“Please, I beg of you, John, kiss me.”

John resists, resists, resists. John tugs and touches, groans, sucks in air and with it Hal’s very essence. He’s dizzy, giddy with the feel of him, warm and pliant in his arms. Soft, then hard in places, utterly unbearable.

“I won’t be able to—”

“Kiss me.”

And John does, and in that moment he realizes that all the fire he’d ever felt, was but warm air compared to burning of Hal’s lips. They’re soft and sweet and terribly tender, and still they torment John in such way that every part of him aches to get closer, to feel more, to take and take apart.

John lets his tongue slip into the prince’s mouth and pushes, in, further, deeper, _mine._ John’s whole body hums with tension, he feels himself a bow, pulled taught, unable to imagine what awaits him on the other side of release. His hands slide up beneath Hal’s shirt, and his skin, oh, his sweet skin… Hal shudders in his arms, cries out into the kiss, a sound so wrecked it’s nearly a sob.

Resist.

John steps back, leaving Hal panting and alone in the middle of the room.

“I cannot—” John focus from his mouth, _be without you, release you, not have you, exist_. "you will be King, regardless of your intentions, and I cannot stand the thought of having you, taking you, and letting you go."

"You've already lost me. You've already allowed me to go." Hal looks at John, tugs his at clothes, where John, unthinking, pulled them from their place.

John is rock hard, angry, terrified and stricken. He cannot think, just sees images of Hal open and wanton, moaning and tender and violent. He cannot look away.

Hal closes his eyes. Stands very silent, very still. His head tips as if in pain, his eyes open. Empty now, all sign of Hal—gone. Hal moves around John, opens the door, slips through it, closing it so softly behind himself it barely snicks.

John only realizes he’s on his knees when the pain of impact reaches his mind.


	3. Chapter 3

_The days flew by in herons,_   
_With wide span and precise orientation_   
_Disemboweling rising wisps of resistance._   
_We haven’t been taught to stop, he said to me through black teeth, to turn_   
_Off life. So, life does it for us._   
_An inconvenience._   
_A lack of manners._   
_Its parents should have taught it better._   
_I laugh, imagining life’s parents with heron wings._

Hal’s bed, when John eventually takes the three required steps from the middle of the room to fall back on its sheets, is soft. Falstaff lets his head drop to the side, and breathes in Hal’s scent, then follows it, rolling onto his stomach, pressing his face into the pillow. John closes his eyes, inhaling, and it’s like an assault, his body thrums, cock straining in his trousers. Falstaff presses his hips into the mattress, groans, does it again, harder this time.

Slower.

It would have been so easy to push Hal back, back, until he hit the edge of the bed, and went down on it for John, spreading open in silent invitation. John grits his teeth, giddy with the idea of stripping the prince, unlacing his shirt, revealing flesh, by sliver and sliver. Falstaff wouldn’t touch it with his hands, instead he’s go at it with mouth and tongue while his fingers played with the drawstrings of Hal’s trousers. Would Hal push those down himself, impatient with Falstaff’s teasing? Would he gasp? Beg? Bite his lip, let his eyes fall closed, back arching under John’s insistent touch?

Need twists itself about John’s solar plexus, his mouth goes dry. He closes his eyes. He’d press his cheek into the soft skin of Hal’s stomach. He’d let it rest there, breathing the boy in, then run his beard against Hal’s ribs, and the prince would twist, laughing, trying to get away from it. Trying to get closer. To get more.

Falstaff’s movements become stuttered, he hears himself moan. Thinks—if only the idea of Hal does this to him, what will become of him if it’s realized? He wonders if he will be undone, if his skin will fall about him in ribbons, followed by untangling twists of muscle, and then the crumbling of his old bones. John wonders if his soul will simply decompose. And with a wave of dizzying realization, Falstaff understands that it doesn’t matter: who is he to morn what he will lose to Hal, when the prince so clearly owns all of John already, from body to mind to soul? All he can hope to get is something in the exchange: the night, Hal’s flesh; if not his heart, if not the boy’s devotion. He should have let himself take Hal. Should have let himself be transfigured into beast of blood and flesh.

It is such a shame: realizing that you can do nothing but stare at your future like a toppling tower: stare at it, understand it, and know it to be none-the-less, utterly unavoidable.

John pushes himself off the bed, breathes, breathes. Tries to straighten his hair, his mind.

Grits his teeth, and with a furious burst of resolve, storms out of the room and down the stairs. He shall pull Hal from the breakfast table, drag him up the stairs and take him until Hal remembers nothing, not his name, nor his mind, but only John and his hands upon him. John shall take him again and again, until separating becomes at least half as hard for Hal as it will be for Falstaff.

John scans the common room, but it’s mostly deserted.

“Where is he?” He snarls to the innkeeper who bares her teeth at him in an caricature of a smile.

“Gone,” the glee in her voice completely, unquestionably honest.

“Gone where?”

“The King’s men came for him. Hal ain’t coming back for you this time.”

John rolls his eyes. Of course Hal will be back. Where’s he going to go?

“When he’s back tell ‘im I’m in his room. I’ll be taking up with it.”

The innkeeper snorts, “you wait and wait and wait, I’ll be removing your body from up there, cus you’ll be waiting till your grave.”

“Monstrous hag,” John mutters and climbs the stairs.

*

He waits a day. Two. Three.

News reaches them that the old king is dead, a new one soon to be crowned. John imagines what it would look like—Hal choosing the crown instead of freedom. Thinks, the prince would have made a spectacular king, such as England has never seen before.

Imagines him in thick velvets and soft silks. Imagines taking them off him, one layer at a time, letting them fall to the floor with no care for the value of them, or the hours of labor it must have taken little old women to hand-stitch jewels and pearls, vines and roses of golden thread into them. John would have eyes for none of it, only Hal, only his flesh, decorated with a red flush of need and soft stripes, left by John’s fingernails where he’d run them, a little too forcefully over Hal’s thighs.

He’s not well impressed that the prince had departed on an argument, but timing cannot be helped, and there’s no use wallowing in the waiting. A few more days and Hal will be at his side, and all will be as it once was, only better, because John will make Hal his, and that will bring both of them more joy then any crown ever could.

Althouhg, John supposes that it must be so odd for him, watching his brother take the crown he’d grown expecting to wear.

*

John wakes. Washes. Eats. Waits.

He doesn’t drink, afraid that if he’s drunk when Hal gets home he’ll be unable to fully be present, and Hal will, rightfully, cut his words in half, discounting them for inebriation.

Another day passes, then another. John feels like a beast in hibernation, waiting for the first touch of spring.

*

John is deep asleep when Hal’s door finally opens. He lets his eyes remain closed, he wants to give Hal the opportunity to see him, to draw his own conclusions about John’s presence in his bed.

Hal remains stoically silent, so John looks, and finds not Hal, but some old man standing at the door.

“What is this?” John asks, surprised. Has Hal decided to remain at the palace? Is he calling for John to join him at his side?

“Who are you?” asks the man a little too abruptly.

“I am I. Who are you?”

“What is your purpose here?”

John’s purpose?

“I think you just woke me up from it, didn’t ya?”

“Rise from that bed at once.”

John blinks at him stupidly. Who is this fool? What right does he have to speak to John in such a manner? “Who are you?” he asks again. “Where is Hal?”

“These lodgings are in the contents of the property of the King of England. You are trespassing and I order you to vacate at once.”

That’s not true. This room belongs to Hal, John knows, he was there when Hal payed for it. He’d seen Hal—

“What King of England?”

*

The coronation comes and goes, Hal doesn’t return.

John starts to drink again. He dinks and fights and tries to screw, but screwing’s worse then remaining sober: all he thinks is Hal, Hal, Hal; all he sees is the boy’s soft flesh, spread beneath his hands; and every girl, tall or slight, full-bodied or boyish just makes him long for Hal all the more.

He considers going up to the capital and dismisses the idea. God, he won’t even make it past the gate. What will he say? Let me pass! I am a friend of the King! What a farce.

All this time he’d been no more than a pastime, a source of drunken entertainment. Thank god he had never let himself wind up in Hal’s bed. Where would he be now? He can barely stand the fantasy, what would he do with actual memories?

John drinks away his savings, and without Hal there to foot most of the bills, or encourage him to take on odd jobs, quickly descends into debt.

When had he become so dependent, he wonders. Once he’d been a force to be reckoned with, men would leave the battlefield when they discovered he was on the other side of it. And now he’s a morose rag of... what? Longing? Desperation? His only friend, gone to walk the one path he’d always sworn he’d never walk down.

And all the while, all John can think is: abandoned, abandoned, abandoned; as he drinks and pukes, fights and steals.

And so, there had never really been any love, only blind desire. A final trifling before stepping back into reality. Hal had never loved him, never cared. John had never been cherished, just... tolerated. A mere convenience. What was he to expect? The living do not dally long with the dead.

*

Weeks pass, and still, every time the light touches his face, all John can think is of the way Hal’s lips had touched his cheeks.

John sleeps, and every night, wishes harder not to wake. But life is cruel, so wake he does.

**Author's Note:**

> There's something about the movie that just captivated me . I'm completely obsessed. Send help.


End file.
